LegalZoom's heartwarming tribute to Capitalism

"My mom made the BEST toffee ever.  She'd make it on cold winter days as a very special treat- I can still remember coming home from school and finding a plate on it on the kitchen table and how happy it made me to eat it while drinking a glass of milk and telling mom all about my day....

And when I got older, I would help Mom make her toffee for holiday gift baskets, it was so much fun to make batch after batch and break it up and put it into gaily decorated boxes and hand them out to the mailman and the gas man and the sitter and my teachers at school, they all loved my Mom's toffee so very much...

And all along, my dream was that someday my Mom would kick off and leave me the recipe, so I could turn the recipe that had been passed down through five generations going back to the old country into a business employing six people at minimum wage and earning me some serious coin after the second year, once the industrial toffee-pulling machine had been paid off allowing me to can those teenagers I allowed to 'intern' with me during their summer before starting college.....

And then I achieved the larger vision in my dream, shutting down my local operation and moving the whole enterprise to Singapore, where it now employs 200 11-year olds making $600 a year under the supervision of very reasonably priced overseers.  Once I replaced the cane sugar with corn sugar (sugar is sugar!) and added an amazing array of artificial colors and flavors, the money REALLY began to roll in!

Every once in a while, I even whip up a batch of my Mom's Now Famous Toffee- it almost tastes like the crap I sold 4.5 million boxes of in 86 countries last year!  Thanks, Legal Zoom, for making my dream come true!

Oh, and thanks, Mom, wherever you are!

Verizon, Kmart, and the march toward unfettered Crudity on American television

These commercials are supposed to be Get-Around-the-FCC clever and funny.  If you think they are clever and funny, please keep your comments off my blog, stop eating paint chips, and please please please don't breed.  Or tell your mom you aren't ready to be on the internet without supervision yet.

I can't even begin to describe how unclever and unfunny this all is.  It's just so stupid and rude and manipulative and gross.  It makes me wonder what I ever found offensive in "Punch Dub Days"- I'd take a million of those ads if it meant I never had to see crap like this ever, ever again on my tv screen.

I wish I could say I'm boycotting Kmart because of their disgusting ad, but fact is I don't shop Kmart and I'm not even sure if there's one anywhere near me.  I do have Verizon, and as soon as it's economically feasible, I'll dump the service in protest of their revolting new campaign.  Because man is this ever wretched.

No More Posing, NFL

As this commercial plays ad nauseum (no bad pun intended there) the Player's Union is demanding the immediate reinstatement of Ray Rice.

I guess the NFL's message is "No More," while the Union's is "well, ok, domestic violence is bad, but this young man has the right to knock his wife cold, drag her body out of the elevator, and go right back to making money on the football field."  Uh huh.

Way to give unions a bad name.  Just what they need.  Meanwhile, the NFL has to stare down the Player's Union on this one.  I suspect that public opinion will be on the NFL's side, but I'm not positive.  Here's what I AM positive of- the Union is making an ass of itself, and needs to get slapped down hard ( unfortunate word choice unfortunate, not intentional.)

Ally's bankless banking commercials: Oddly Familiar, Oddly Aggressive

In one way, these ads look a lot like all of the other ads out there- this one in particular does the usual "white guy standing in the middle of a massive, immaculately decorated, gleaming-white-clean living room" (seriously, why does everyone in TV land have to possess living rooms and kitchens larger than my apartment?)  That's the "familiar" part.  All white people in tv commercials live in multi-million dollar homes with cavernous rooms that look like they are maintained by 6-man cleaning crews.  Got it.

But in another way, these ads practically beg us to dislike Ally Bank.  The operator is always sneering at the concerns of the potential customers.  In one I did earlier this year, a woman tells the Ally Bank Phone Bank Serf "I'm nervous about trying new things. "  Instead of just explaining why Ally Bank's "no place to complain in person, your money is at the mercy of a computerized phone menu" strategy is a good thing, the operator challenges this "irrational" fear- "what's wrong with trying new things?" (and the message is instantly botched- like it is in this ad- by showing examples of why the caller is exactly right to worry.)  In this ad, the caller's "I don't like hidden things" is not greeted with "I understand, here's why you have nothing to worry about" but rather "why is that?"  Again and again, Ally comes off as an aggressive car salesman challenging their potential customers to reach way down, find their guts, and just sign on the freaking dotted line, you weird spineless coward you.

What's the deal?  Here's my take on Ally's Bottom-Line Strategy:

1.  Ally Bank is the intelligent choice for very successful people.  If you want to be successful like these people on tv, you'll go with Ally Bank.

2.  Ally Bank gets that No Branches is a legitimately scary idea (no WAY I'm handing my money over to a company that will never, EVER provide a person I can sit down with and look in the eye if I ever have an issue with them, but that's just poor, unsucessful, cowardly me) so it's focused on shaming potential customers into buying in- "what's the matter with you?  Are you deranged?  Get with it.  Just give us your money. We'll always be here, just a phone call and 20 callers in the queue ahead of you away.  You don't like walking into banks and sitting down with people and discussing stuff anyway.  That's for cowards."

PASS!

What the thirty-something execs at Subaru think of the concepts of "grandma," "Woodstock," and "Love." This isn't pretty.

Ah, ok, I get it now!  "Grandma" was a stoner who hitched her way to Saugerties during the Summer of Love in order to experience Woodstock and the feeling of being soaked to the skin because of the incredibly crappy weather that marked most of the three-day music festival.  Judging from the stringy grey hair and the vaguely hippy-ish clothing, we are supposed to assume that Grandma never really got past her hippy phase and has spent most of the last forty years eating homemade yogurt and granola when she wasn't working in her organic garden and planning firebombing raids on Exxon-Mobile drilling rigs.

(Grandpa is sadly absent- while Grandma was living in the past, he was the CEO for Walmart who organized the shift to All Chinese Products back in the early-80s. Or he designed low-grade atomic weapons for the Defense Department.  Because someone had to finance Grandma's self-indulgent delusions.  Grampa died at 55 of a heart attack but he left a very nice insurance policy- thank goodness, because hey those annual excursions to visit the tortoises in the Galapagoes don't pay for themselves.)

Grandma remembers everything about Woodstock- where she skinny-dipped, where she banged that guy who would become Grampa about nine months later, where she almost OD'd on hashish....the decade or so after that is a little hazy, but it hardly matters, because those three days were the absolute highlight of her life anyway.  Kind of like that horrid old woman from Titanic, her entire existance encompasses a few hours from her 19th year.  All the crap after that- the kids, the mortgage, the koi pond, that organic garden, the trips to Whole Foods and the Think Globally Act Locally meetings in the Lincoln Navigator- all that kind of fades into obscure haze compared to those hours listening to tinny music out of crap sound systems in that soggy field in upstate New York.

This Minute of Twee wraps up with Incredibly Embarrassing Grandma hugging the tree which once provided a little shade while she and Future Grampa Did It To High Flying Bird- at least, she thinks that was the tree.  I mean, who knows- she was so plastered, it's kind of amazing that her son turned out as well as he did.  Still- she and the family are hugging a tree.  That's "love," in Subaru's book.  But let's not forget that love in Subaru's book is also stalking a female bicyclist and lovingly stroking a gearshift knob (see the archives.)  Subaru just keeps getting weirder about this.

Amazon, Amazon's Not-Kindle, and Dishonest Advertising

Most commerials are deceitful in one way or another, usually engaging in dishonesty through omission. But this ad contains an outright LIE.  Two of them.  Did you hear both?

1.  "With a free month of Amazon Prime for new members, you'll get unlimited streaming of more than 40,000 movie and tv episodes...." um, no you won't.  First, you can't logically put the number "40,000" and "unlimited" in the same sentence.  Second, it's not possible to stream 40,000 tv and/or movie episodes in one month- what the ad is really saying is "you can go back and watch up to 40,000 pieces of crap on your phone IF, when the free month is over, you subscribe to the service."

2.  "You have a lot to do."  Um, no you don't.  If you had "a lot to do," you wouldn't have time to turn your brain into warm, mushy pudding watching crap on a tiny screen.  And no, I don't count watching tv as "doing" something, sorry.

Oh, and for "good" Italian food? I guess that would mean a trip to The Olive Garden

And if you think that a national chain of fast food restaurants is the place to go for good barbecue, you've never, ever had good barbecue.  And if you insist on going to Wendy's for barbecue, you never, ever will.

Shouldn't "Red" be 100 lbs overweight and shooting insulin on a daily basis by now?  She sure should not be eating Every Freaking Meal as if she's going to the electric chair as soon as it's done.